Hi Vercel team,

I’m on the Hobby plan and have a brand-new Vercel project with zero deployments.

Current setup:

• Production Branch: main
• Validated branch: agent/gated-multi-agent-validation
• Branch-scoped Preview environment variables are already configured
• Preview uses a separate non-production Supabase project

Requirement:

The first successful deployment must be classified strictly as Preview-only.

We attempted:

vercel deploy --target=preview

with no --prod flag.

We cannot accept:

• a placeholder Production deployment
• production-domain assignment
• temporarily promoting a non-production build to Production

Is there a supported project setting, permission, workflow, CLI flag, or API procedure that guarantees the first deployment of a brand-new project is classified as Preview rather than Production?

If not, is this a known platform limitation or bug on brand-new projects?

We’re intentionally holding the project at zero deployments until we have a safe supported path.

Thanks.